Wednesday, 21 June. Today’s press conference in Hong Kong, The Shaw Prize Foundation announced The Shaw Laureates for 2006. Information was posted on the website www.shawprize.org at Hong Kong time 1630 (GMT 0830).

The Shaw Prize consists of three annual prizes: Astronomy, Life Science and Medicine, and Mathematical Sciences, each prize bearing a monetary award of one million US dollars. This will be the third year that the Prize has been awarded and the presentation ceremony is scheduled for Tuesday, 12 September 2006.

Details of the Shaw Laureates

The Shaw Prize in Astronomy – awarded jointly to Professor Saul Perlmutter of the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA; Professor Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA; and Professor Brian Schmidt of the Mount Stromlo Observatory of the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia for discovering that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, implying in the simplest interpretation that the energy density of space is non-vanishing even in the absence of any matter and radiation.

The Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine– awarded to Professor Xiaodong Wang of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, USA for his discovery of the biochemical basis of programmed cell death, a vital process that balances cell birth and defends against cancer.

The Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences– awarded jointly to Professor David Mumford of the Brown University, USA for his contributions to mathematics, and to the new interdisciplinary fields of pattern theory and vision research; and Professor Wu Wentsun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at Beijing, China for his contributions to the new interdisciplinary field of mathematics and mechanization.